Dual Boot Problem

[Jonathan Berry]

On 6/14/05, Jessica L. Veltman <veltjes at iit.edu> wrote:
> As seems to be the trend with Fedora, I am once again having problems
> with dual booting with XP. I love Fedora, and have installed every main
> release, but have never gotten dual boot to work right the first
> install. This time though, it isn't the usual problem. I got all the way
> through the installation process, until I had to restart my computer. At
> which time, my computer restarted straight into windows. No grub,
> nothing. Not even an error. I installed GAG, and it can see the Fedora
> partitions (which are on a seperate drive from my windows install), but
> it cannot boot them. It says that it cannot find the boot sector.
> I would truely love to run only Fedora, and tried it for awhile, but my
> school requires windows for some very specific software that WINE won't

Here is a thought, maybe GRUB is installed to your MBR, but maybe it's
installed to the wrong MBR.  This can happen if your system.map file
(I think that's the name) has mapped your drives incorrectly.  This
becomes more likely if you have PATA and SATA drives.
If you want to test this, try swapping the drives momentarily to see
if you get a "No operating system found" error or if GRUB comes up. 
Even if GRUB comes up, though, it is probably the case that your
system won't boot; it will get confused with the drives in the wrong
order.
Now to actually fixing the problem : ).  Boot with the rescue CD (CD
1/DVD with "linux rescue") and when it is finished run:

chroot /mnt/sysimage/
grub-install /dev/hda
exit
exit

You also might need to run grub-install with the --recheck option to
rebuild the map file if it is wrong.

> run. Also, I'd prefer to use the 64-bit version, which as far as I know
> still doesn't have Flash or Java support for the 64-bit browsers.
> Granted, I could always install the 32-bit browsers, but it would be

You can have the best of both worlds.  Install the 64-bit version,
install one 64-bit browser and another 32-bit browser.  Then use the
32-bit browser for when you need java and flash.  Otherwise, use the
64-bit one.  Why so picky? ; )

> nicer to not have to do that. But basically it comes down to I have to
> dual boot or not use Fedora, and its not working for me right now. Has
> anyone else had this problem or know how I might fix it? Thanks!
> 
> -Jessie

Jonathan